Health
Boycott Whole Foods
Published August 19, 2009 @ 12:40PM PT
I've been looking the other way for a long time each time I go to Whole Foods, aka Whole Paycheck. I mean, I already know that they profit off of creating an image of sustainability- mixing organic produce with conventional. I know that the CEO John Mackey is a libertarian who opposes labor unions (none of the Whole Foods are union), and in general opposes most the ideals I fight for in my life. But, Whole Foods make my shopping pretty easy and made it easy for me to check my values at the door.
But, no more.
It is one thing to disagree with a CEO like John Mackey. Fine. We all have different politics. But, its another thing when he is taking his money and influence to fight against everything I believe in. And, right now we are a critical tipping point on health care, and the need for a public health care option.
John Mackey decided to tke the politics of the teabaggers and make them acceptable for the Wall Street crowd last week in the Wall Street Journal.. He started by throwing out the "socialism" charge at President Obama and then goes onto to argue for Health Savings Accounts, deregulation, and getting rid of insurance companies from being able to discriminate against medical conditions. Oh, and he throws in as well, people are fat so that is why we have a health care problem ( solution- shop at Whole Foods, duh!).
Mackey argues against the public option with: "While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system"And that is where he lost me, and my whole paycheck. We need a strong public option. We need to be able to have a system that can compete with the massive insurance industry. Our small businesses, including small scare organic farmers, need real health insurance reform.
I am for a sustainable food system and I believe a important key is looking to make sure all the players up the chain are supported. Which means- we need to make sure workers are paid well ( ahem- EFCA), that farmers and employees on farms can buy health insurance ( ahem- public option), and that the companies we buy from support our values for real, not just market our values back to us.
So, I am taking my money to the farmers markets, UFCW organized grocery stores, and smaller natural food stores. I hope you follow suit.
If you're on facebook, you can join the Boycott Whole Foods group here.
[Update: Natasha here, minor URL edit and corrections made, sorry to bump in.]
Administrative Note
Published August 09, 2009 @ 12:24AM PT
Hey folks,
Sorry to leave you hanging lately. I broke my foot last week right after I got back and after years and years of no insurance (and the fact that it didn't actually hurt as much as a migraine) I'd half convinced myself that it was just a sprain. Until the end of this last week, when more of my foot was covered by spreading bruises than not and it became clear that it needed to be x-rayed and properly seen to.
It's hard to even sit up for long, the swelling and bruising get worse when it isn't elevated. (Don't get me started on how bad it is getting downstairs from the 3rd floor.) Also, there's the prescription pain medication. As you can imagine, this situation isn't good for my computer use or focus.
Steph Larsen has written many times in this space about the need for universal healthcare in order to preserve farming as a viable small business. A lot of independent contractors and small business owners, or people who would like to be small business owners, know the truth of it. I broke my 5th metatarsal, the most commonly broken bone in the body, and I can right now barely do a job that involves typing from my home. This could mean the end of some people's entrepreneurial dreams, or the loss of a part time job with little security that supported a small business, like a farm. And many farmers do have second jobs to support their farming, both for the extra income and if possible, for even more valuable health coverage.
I'm lucky to have recently married into health coverage, but if it isn't retroactive to our wedding day, this one injury is likely to wipe out most of our recently acquired financial cushion. We were a little slow with the paperwork, being kind of busy and all.
Anyway, I hope I'll be back making a nuisance of myself again soon. But extensive reading and research, or even a lot of typing, are just not happening right now. Sorry.
cheers,
n
Animal Confinement Waste
Published August 06, 2009 @ 07:50AM PT
Fun facts from the recent Environmental Impact of Industrial Farm Animal Production (pdf) report issued for the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production:
... By any estimate, the total amount of farm animal waste produced annually in the United States is substantial. In its report for the year 2001, the usda estimated the output of manure from farm animals at 920,000 US short tons of dry matter per day (usda ars 2002). This translates to greater than 300 million metric tons of dry mass or more than 660 billion pounds per year. Of this mass, 86% (788,000 tons per day) was projected to stem from animals held in confinement. In contrast, the American Society of Agricultural Engineers provides a higher estimate of 540 million metric tons of dry weight excreta per annum (American Society of Agricultural Engineers, 2005). Lower estimates of 133 million tons of manure per year on a dry weight basis also have been reported recently in the peer-reviewed literature using information contained in usda online databases (Burkholder et al., 2007). Reporting the volume of excreta based on the lifespan of the food animal results again in a different set of data.
Regardless of the exact amount generated, farm animal waste exceeds human sanitary waste production by at least one order of magnitude (Burkholder et al., 2007). Yet in comparison to the lesser amount of human waste, the management and disposal of animal wastes are poorly regulated. This lack of protection may have been without consequence in traditional agriculture, because animal wastes produced by traditional animal husbandry methods in rural locations did not usually present risks to local communities that relied on ecosystem services for attenuating pathogens and absorbing or diluting nutrients. However, similar to large human settlements, improper management of feces from ifap facilities can and does overwhelm natural cleansing processes. ...
It isn't just waste, it's duplicative waste. We manufacture fertilizer (its use has gone up six fold since the 1950s, according to the report) and put it on the fields to grow feed for animals who produce fertilizer that then becomes unmanageable garbage. Oh, but not just a lot of garbage, biohazardous garbage. From elsewhere in the report:
Senate Cuts Animal ID Funding By Half
Published August 05, 2009 @ 02:05PM PT
Woohoo! I get to say nice things about the Senate!
I'm pleased to report that my usual causticity can be suspended for the duration of this post to applaud the Senate's unanimous consent vote to cut funding for the National Animal ID System. Go, Senate!
Jill Richardson at LaVidaLocavore has reposted the press release by R-CALF USA, the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund, United Stockgrowers of America, and I think that the most salient point in the entire debate is encapsulated in this paragraph of their statement, here:
3) No food safety benefits. NAIS will not prevent food borne illnesses from e. coli or salmonella, because the contamination occurs at the slaughterhouse, while NAIS tracking ends at the time of slaughter. Thus, NAIS will neither prevent the contamination nor increase the government's ability to track contaminated meat back to its source. In addition, NAIS will hurt efforts to develop safer, decentralized local food systems. ...
If the program fails in its main, stated goal, if it is in fact structured such that failure is inevitable, what are we spending all this money for? As a liberal, progressive, believer in the possibility of government to do good, I have a deep and abiding interest in money given to the government not being wasted. When it's wasted, it creates an instant opportunity cost against something good and useful being done with that money.
Of the money that remains in the program, the Senate directives limit its use to rule-making activities, and on that front, I have a suggestion: lay the groundwork to institute premise ID, instead of animal ID.
I was talking a couple months ago with Margaret Krome, my former internship supervisor and policy program director at the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute, about how NAIS implementation has gone in Wisconsin. She said that at this point, they've just done premise registration, which sidesteps many of the concerns raised directly by Amish communities and does actually provide a public health benefit.
Krome explained that when there were animal disease outbreaks, the premise registry let public health officials target their notification efforts to the right people. This registration simply lets officials know that there are livestock on the property and what type. That's actually useful to know should there be an outbreak of hoof and mouth disease, scabies, or what have you. It also isn't burdensome to farmers, needing to be neither expensive nor time-consuming. See? Useful.
Anyway, cheers again to the Senate for showing such good sense. It seems in short supply these days.(Photo credit: kimberlyfaye on Flickr.)
Organic Complications
Published August 03, 2009 @ 12:03PM PT
So, there was a very narrowly focused literature review put out by Britain's pro-GMO Food Standards Agency that was widely reported to claim that there weren't any health benefits from organic food.
It shouldn't be a surprise that the FSA's theory of pesticide is "don't worry, be happy", as Geoffrey Lean of the Telegraph notes, and indeed the report completely ignores the potential health benefits of lower pesticide exposure. As Lean says in closing;
... It reminds me of a minister who used to complain that there was a "myth" that pesticides were "toxic". What, I asked him, would be the use of one that wasn't? Answer came there none.
Worse, the review seems to have excluded studies indicating a greater nutrient density in organic foods. Other nutrient differences reported are probably a result of the fact that conventional agriculture destroys and degrades soil, in a number of ways, and food managed solely for high yields in dying soil doesn't appear to be as good for you as food grown in healthier soil.
Has it, however, been proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that there are nutritional differences between conventional and organic foods over and above the products of our chemical warfare industry? Some evidence suggests that's the case, but as many have pointed out, the body of research to date is minimal. So if the claim that organics are more nutritious (as opposed to less contaminated) needs more support, the claim that they aren't is on even thinner ice.
A Big Food Safety Problem
Published July 30, 2009 @ 11:29AM PT
Sick cows are one of our biggest food safety problems:
... Acidosis is often associated with a shift from a foragebased diet to a high concentrate-based diet or excessive consumption of fermentable carbohydrates. Acidosis may occur in cattle on high-grain diets common with youth livestock projects, bull development programs, and cattle finishing programs. It can also occur in stocker calves when self-feeders and highstarch feeds such as corn are used.
Acidosis is the result of low rumen pH. The typical pH of the rumen on a forage-based diet is 6 to 7. As the amount of forage or roughage in the diet decreases and the amount of concentrate increases, the pH of the rumen falls between 5 and 6, depending on the forage to concentrate ratio of the diet. Low pH supports growth of lactic acid-producing bacteria. Lactic acid is very strong and reduces rumen pH even more. Acute (severe) acidosis occurs when ruminal pH drops below 5.2, while subacute (less severe) acidosis occurs at a ruminal pH of less than 5.6. Laminitis, liver abscesses, and polioencephalomalacia often accompany acidosis. ...
Cows with acidosis, who've been fed grain instead of forage, produce deadly E. coli that can survive our stomachs. Healthy cows with a nearly neutral rumen pH still have E. coli in their guts, but these varieties of the bacterium are easily handled by our bodies.
The food safety bill that may be resurrected this week, H.R. 2749, does not address this topic, even though it laudably expands federal food recall powers beyond the toothless "voluntary recall." It does impose regressive fees on the sort of small producers not generally responsible for large-scale food contamination.
Congressional leadership may also put it up for a vote under a closed rule, which means no amendments can be offered. Again, I point you to the Center for Rural Affairs analysis of the vote situation. I'd hope that the pressure Congress feels to do something doesn't lead, as it so often does, to doing something stupid.
Real Healthcare Reform Starts with Healthy Food
Published July 28, 2009 @ 12:49PM PT
Yesterday there was the startling report that 10% of all healthcare costs are due to obesity. That totals up to more than $147 billion a year. Considering that the current healtcare bills that are winding their way through Congress are wearing price tags in the $1 - $1.5 trillion range, it is clear that obesity is playing a large role in the spiraling costs.
While so many politicians wax poetic about keeping down costs, a sugar tax has been roundly panned as a non-starter. This is not surprising. As with tobacco, often public sentiment lags behind actual data. America still has a culture that believes that if you're fat, well it's your own damn fault:
Being poor in 21-st century America doesn’t mean not having enough to eat, but often it means being part of a culture where fattening, processed foods are not only relatively cheap and convenient, but socially acceptable. It also means having the kind of job that often isn’t all that rewarding, and you really just need to unwind after work instead of stopping at Whole Foods and whipping yourself up a nice tofu stir-fry.
This, perhaps, is what Bingaman really wants the USCO-OP ( United States Council on Overweight and Obesity Prevention) to change. Because let’s be honest: poor people know that green chile cheeseburgers will make them fatter than steamed salmon will, and they know that doing an hour of exercise will make them fitter than watching an hour of television. They know these things, but often they’ve had a long, hard day at work and they’re tired and hungry and just want to be left alone with their remote control and their burger and their Dr. Pepper.
This attitude is what is going to hold us back from really doing something obesity. Yes, people should exercise, but that's not the whole story. We also live in a society where children drink more soda than milk and soda is one third the price of milk. Until the cost of food reflects the ill side-effects, people will still reach for the green chile cheeseburger, which btw costs one fourth the price of the steamed salmon. And elitists who don't realize that should really shut their traps and not tell poor people how to eat.
So we have an attitude problem. Which is going to be a huge hurdle to clear. One the other side though, is greener pastures. Turns out that countries like Great Britain are already experimenting with sugar taxes. While we won't know for years what are the potential health affects, we do know it has the potential to raise some serious dough:
And here's the payoff: Conservatively estimated, a 10% tax levied on foods that would be defined as "less healthy" by a national standard adopted recently in Great Britain could yield $240 billion in its first five years and $522 billion over 10 years of implementation -- if it were to begin in October 2010. If lawmakers instituted a program of tax subsidies to encourage the purchase of fresh and processed fruits and vegetables, the added revenue would still be $356 billion over 10 years.
